THE SYRIAN BET

Intent on making Syria a future target, this administration throws away it's best source of Al Qaeda intelligence.

In late March Rumsfeld said that Syria would be held accountable for its actions. He accused Syria of supplying Iraq with night-vision goggles and other military goods. He also suggested that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction might be stashed there. Syria denied the assertions, and members of the intelligence community I spoke to characterized the evidence against Syria as highly questionable.

The Syrians were rattled by the threats, in part because many in and close to the Bush Administration have been urging regime change in Damascus for years. In 2000, the Middle East Forum, a conservative Washington think tank, issued a study offering many of the same reasons for taking military action against Syria that were later invoked against Iraq. “The Defense Department pushed for the hard line on Syria,” a former State Department official told me. “I think Rummy was at least testing the waters—to see how far he could go—but the White House was not ready.” The former official added that Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, “is not going to sit on the Pentagon the way she’d have to in order to give the policy of engaging Syria politically a chance. She won’t until the President has made his preferences clear. This kind of policy drift on Syria would be sustainable for another Administration, but Bush can’t take it indefinitely. He’s defined the war on terrorism in theological terms. A President who says ‘You’re either with us or against us’ can’t let policy drift. Rumsfeld’s approach is to tell the President, ‘You do in Syria what you promised to do.’”

In Washington, there was anger about what many officials saw as the decision of the Bush Administration to choose confrontation with Syria over day-to-day help against Al Qaeda. In a sense, the issue was not so much Syria itself as a competition between ideology and practicality—and between the drive to go to war in Iraq and the need to fight terrorism—which has created a deep rift in the Bush Administration. The collapse of the liaison relationship has left many C.I.A. operatives especially frustrated. “The guys are unbelievably pissed that we’re blowing this away,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “There was a great channel at Aleppo. The Syrians were a lot more willing to help us, but they”—Rumsfeld and his colleagues—“want to go in there next.”